Go cougs

November 19, 2014

THERE iS A PYTHON iN THE LiBRARY

While wandering the library, I found myself looking at many many books. There were books everywhere, but one caught my attention. It was very large and a nice green color, looked almost similar to a snake. It was a good sized book too, about 356 pages to be exact. It was sitting on the shelf about halfway through the second floor. When I saw it I knew it was the one to use. It was called Python.

This book was very cool because looks can be deceiving. I saw it and immediately thought it was a research novel or a scientific piece about the snakes, but instead it was all about greek mythology and the connection between snakes and reptiles today. I scanned it and was surprised that it was very informative but difficult to understand since I have very little experience with greek mythology.

Photos courtesy of WSULibs

According to the article we all read, the line “so many books, so little time” originated from Frank Zappa – who we all know from past posts and discussions. He has a point, but many don’t agree with him. Much like searching the internet, the library has a vast majority of information. Though this information is book text instead of digital, but either way it can be overwhelming. When the computer was first invented, and the world wide web followed, many people had no idea how to research and use it, and felt very suffocated with all the information that was forced down their throats. Using a library can help you focus your search on an exact location, book, author, text, and exact information. Unlike the web, you won’t have 3 million+ pages thrown at you. Finding a book gives you an experience and helps you search and possibly get distracted and widen your search. It gives you more time to see where your search leads you. Just like when I was looking for my book, I was not walking through the library for a book that says “python”, I wasn’t even looking for a green book, I just wanted a book that was interesting that would also give me something to talk about.

Having an open mind and using the library allows you to see all the possible books and information, and then deciding where you want to go. A library merely says “Relax, here you go, this is where you start and just see where it takes you”. It is an older edition of the internet, so to speak, but it lets you go from book to book because the information you will be presented with will tell you to “look at this, then look at this”.

The downside to libraries, like the library of congress, is that there are more than 500 lifetimes of reading material in it. Some have millions of books. This is not uncommon nowadays. The problem is that there are no reliable guides to all this information because it exceeds our capability to do so. In this case, this is when Google comes in handy because it generates responses in astonishingly fast speeds.